British spacecraft on seven‑year journey to Mercury

A full-size engineering model of BepiColombo. The real thing will blast off this weekendTIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE

A British-built space probe will be launched on Saturday to map the surface of Mercury as part of BepiColombo — one of the most ambitious missions yet undertaken by the European Space Agency.

A Mercury Transfer Module will be launched on the agency’s most powerful rocket, the Ariane 5, from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana. After separation it will use an ion electric propulsion drive, designed and built by the British defence company Qinetiq, for its seven-year, 5.2 billion-mile journey to deliver the probes to the planet closest to the sun, in 2025.

One, the Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO), was built by Airbus Space and Defence at its assembly centre in Stevenage. The other was made in Japan. The MPO will map Mercury’s…

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